When We Argue About Dave Chappelle, We Should Recognize That Super-Wokeness Is Mostly An Elite Phenomenon

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When We Argue About Dave Chappelle, We Should Recognize That Super-Wokeness Is Mostly An Elite Phenomenon

Excerpt:

Plus, it would be one thing if this survey were some sort of strange outlier, but if you look at the data we have on specific culture-war blowups of relevance to the PC and/or cancel-culture debates, you find the same pattern over and over. Almost always, the opinions most commonly represented in mainstream progressive outlets are not held by the masses, including by the groups seemingly with the most at stake. I’ve written about this before: On issues ranging from Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal to the Washington football team name to what term(s) should be used to refer to people of recent Latin American descent, woke-progressive opinion is often very out of line with that of the majority of members of the groups in question. Not only do the wokest progressives not speak for Americans; they don’t speak for the groups they’re claiming to want to protect. A 40-year-old American Indian from Oklahoma — that paragon of wealth and privilege and white resentment, of course — made this point pretty succinctly when he was interviewed for a focus group which accompanied the release of the More In Common survey: “It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.”

I was reminded of that Native American guy recently when I saw Dictionary.com announce that if you do not capitalize the ‘b’ in ‘black’ when discussing race, “it can be seen as dismissive, disrespectful, and dehumanizing.” I’m sure it can be seen that way, but by what sort of person? How many people in this great nation of ours believe that you are ‘dehumanizing’ millions of people if you write “black Americans,” but granting them their full humanity if you write “Black Americans”? What kind of a neurotic, catastrophizing nerd would possibly think this, and how many academic degrees did they rack up before they came to this conclusion?

Then another example popped up just a few days ago: Walter Mosley, a writer for “Star Trek,” quit his job there after he was reported to HR for using the n-word in the writers’ room. Except he’s black, and he was using it in the context of talking about a time he was called it:

I just told a story about a cop who explained to me, on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all niggers in paddy neighborhoods and all paddies in nigger neighborhoods, because they were usually up to no good. I was telling a true story as I remembered it.

Someone in the room, I have no idea who, called H.R. and said that my use of the word made them uncomfortable, and the H.R. representative called to inform me that such language was unacceptable to my employers. I couldn’t use that word in common parlance, even to express an experience I lived through.

There are so many other examples of situations in which normal, everyday people seem to respond negatively to these sorts of punitive approaches, even if there will always be a smaller and louder group of fierce partisans cheering some such outcomes. To take two of a trillion recent(ish) examples, a lot of people seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of a graduate student being hauled before administrators for criticizing Israel on a listserv, or a professor being forced to resign for criticizing cops and the American flag.

The point is, the idea that only a bigoted white redneck would raise an eyebrow at the claim that the adjective ‘black’ is dehumanizing, or find it outrageous that a black man could get in trouble at work for relating a racial slur he was the victim of, or wonder aloud why, on so many issues on which woke progressives are holding a given opinion to protect a given group, members of that group disagree, or get tired or frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary nature of complex linguistic rules and over-the-top social-media cancellations and bloated, overbearing administrative entities on college campuses, is silly.

Because the fact is that the rules often aren’t particularly coherent, and they’re being created and enforced most enthusiastically by people who represent a very small subset of American public opinion. Yes, there is a whiff of get-off-my-lawn orneriness to Chappelle’s act (So what? Plenty of standup comedians mine their cantankerousness for comedy), but he’s also making a fair point: You laughed at my slapstick crackhead and my joke about Wayne Brady assaulting a sex worker and, in this very special, about white heroin addicts, but these other jokes, those are just too much? Why? Who made these rules? Why do I have to follow them? Why am I being judged by such a different standard now that you all have decided I’m bad?

One more time: I understand that it is very profitable, in a masturbatory sense, to pretend that on the “anti-PC” side, we have a bunch of white people who desperately want to hurl ethnic slurs at minorities with impunity, and that on the “pro-PC” side, we have a rainbow coalition calling merely for decency. Those aren’t the real battle lines here, though. When these blowups happen and make national news, they are usually about much more nuanced issues than that — tricky questions about what’s acceptable, who decides, what the ‘punishment’ should be for violating certain norms, and so on.

This is a very good and thoughtful article about the disconnect between elite opinion and ordinary opinion on things. Comedy is becoming particularly "problematic" now as taste-makers fail to understand that most of comedy is some combination of pain/surprise. Unfortunately, how humans experience comedy is kind of hard-wired regardless of skin tone or sexual interests.

I'm not a huge fan of either Chappelle or of Louis C.K. but I don't have to pay for $75 buck tickets to think that both of them didn't deserve the blowback they got from the twitterati and various cultural mavens. Don't like a show or a set? Don't go back. Didn't even see the set but are still outraged? Get a hobby. Appalled by some individual's consensual kink? Don't buy their stuff.

It's not like comedians are setting the curriculum for public schools or the policies for local and national governments. Now, those people really aren't funny. These guys? Just move on.

This is a very good and thoughtful article about the disconnect between elite opinion and ordinary opinion on things. Comedy is becoming particularly "problematic" now as taste-makers fail to understand that most of comedy is some combination of pain/surprise. Unfortunately, how humans experience comedy is kind of hard-wired regardless of skin tone or sexual interests.

I'm not a huge fan of either Chappelle or of Louis C.K. but I don't have to pay for $75 buck tickets to think that both of them didn't deserve the blowback they got from the twitterati and various cultural mavens. Don't like a show or a set? Don't go back. Didn't even see the set but are still outraged? Get a hobby. Appalled by some individual's consensual kink? Don't buy their stuff.

It's not like comedians are setting the curriculum for public schools or the policies for local and national governments. Now, those people really aren't funny. These guys? Just move on.

Scratch a leftist, find a fascist. None of this is about respect, it's about control. Most experienced and intelligent adults that vote left of center either do so out of fatalism "it's all going to end badly anyway" or "moving the needle" which means most things are going to stay the same but some things can be nudged a bit - and they can't win elections when they say "it's a game of inches" so you get the Bok morphism we've seen.

The rest are easily manipulated - and increasingly (astoundingly) ignorant. There are actual people - high school teachers and nurses - who think that the world is literally going to end in 11 years if we don't address climate change.

"What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer."

Scratch a leftist, find a fascist. None of this is about respect, it's about control. Most experienced and intelligent adults that vote left of center either do so out of fatalism "it's all going to end badly anyway" or "moving the needle" which means most things are going to stay the same but some things can be nudged a bit - and they can't win elections when they say "it's a game of inches" so you get the Bok morphism we've seen.

The rest are easily manipulated - and increasingly (astoundingly) ignorant. There are actual people - high school teachers and nurses - who think that the world is literally going to end in 11 years if we don't address climate change.

A lot of the loud voices of this type have simply never lived through any of this before. They are literally unaware that credible sources have predicted catastrophe for hundreds of years. I lived through all the "We'll freeze to death/starve to death/choke to death/heat up to death" stuff.

It's simply never true because the proponents never read history and have zero ability to target a threat and observe it over time.

We aren't freezing to death although mean winter temps have dropped slightly in some regions. To a turnip, there is no difference between 32 F and 29 F. The turnip is dead and rotting. Same for the difference between 78 F and 81 F for wheat. Wheat likes both so precip is really the issue although lower temps make for slower starts.

We aren't heating, either, although urban heat sinks are a real thing (luckily, they grow no food).

We are not overpopulated. Specific urban areas may have more people and less food but that's a political/admin/crime thing - not an overpopulation thing. Even in undeveloped countries, pops are dropping and will stabilize.

On every measure of air pollution given the population, the U.S.A. easily exceeded all targets of pollution reduction in the popular "accords" we did not sign. Think about that. Both air pollution and vista impairment have dropped steadily despite higher pops in urban areas since 1980. If you think your air sucks compared to Great Grand Dad's air, you are a moron.

We used tech to meet and exceed those goals and we largely did it because it's more efficient. Not better for kids or pregnant women or owls. It's better for shareholders who include a bunch of people with employer investment plans which is everybody working for a largish employer - hotel maids, union members, teachers, state employees, non-family farm workers (not contract), full time retail employees, nurses, librarians, and many more.

One of the funniest lines I ever heard was Robin Williams in, I think, Good Morning Vietnam. Something along the lines of, "We don't say 'dikes;' we say 'women in sensible shoes'." Echoed years later by one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (who also offend a lot of people for some reason), who named herself "Sister Sensible Shoes."

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